By IANS,
United Nations : India has rebuffed as “unwarranted and irrelevant” a Pakistani attempt to raise the Kashmir issue during a debate in the Special Political and Decolonisation Committee of the United Nations.
The Pakistani reference to “the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir (that) is unwarranted and completely irrelevant to the work of this Committee,” Indian representative R. Ravindra, first secretary at India’s UN mission, said exercising his right of reply.
“I would like to remind the distinguished representative of Pakistan that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India,” he said during the debate Monday.
“The Indian constitution guarantees the fundamental rights to all its citizens. The people of Jammu and Kashmir have expressed their free will by participating in free and fair elections held at regular intervals,” Ravindra said.
Earlier, raising New Delhi’s hackles, Tahir Hussain Andrabi, counsellor at Pakistan’s Permanent Mission to the UN, sought a United Nations-led plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people saying Jammu and Kashmir has never been an “integral part” of India.
“Jammu and Kashmir is neither an integral part of India, nor has it ever been so,” he said.
“In South Asia, the inalienable right to self-determination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir had been recognised by a number of Security Council resolutions. Indeed, the UN decolonisation agenda would be incomplete without the resolution of the dispute,” the Pakistani delegate said.
He said that Pakistan was committed to finding a peaceful resolution to the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, which would lead to “durable peace and stability” in South Asia.